Computer Science view of talking to new girls at Salsa event

Computer Science view of talking to new girls at Salsa event: You have a life story and she has a life story - those are graphs of information, with nodes and edges. You ask one open ended question and she'll give you one node's description in the graph. By open ended I mean not yes/no - because yes/no is just binary and you only get one bit of information back. Open ended questions like "how did you get into Salsa" typically give you a lot more than a bit. Once you have one node to start with, you can do a depth first search to a common interest node. That is, you ask a question about the first node, which gives you an adjacent node. Then you can ask about that, etc, etc, moving step by step. Once you hit a common interest node, you make that clear by expressing how you share information or opinion about that node. This creates a little connection between your graph and her graph, a new edge. You continue to move from node to node, connecting, adding edges. If a conversation gets deep enough, you might even start adding new nodes to both of your graphs. And if things go well, your graphs end up fairly entangled, with lots of interesting connections. If they don't, you end up with just one or two ephemeral edges connected to her, and they will probably fade with time. Contrast this to talking to a friend. There's a major difference - you've already got edges connecting your graphs to start with. You also have random access - you can go anywhere pretty quickly - rather than step by step, searching and checking, coherently from one node to the next. That freedom and that experience is part of why friendship is so valuable.

The Force

There is a Force of light and dark, like in Star Wars. However, it's an emergent property of all life (an nonliving things). You can't use it directly like they do in the movie, but it operates according to the actions of all involved. You can allow either the dark or light side to affect your actions.

Alien boobs

Alien women probably would not have boobs. Most animals do not (even ones that give milk).

Beauty

Looking at a flower, I wonder why a flower built for a bee is pretty to me also. Maybe there are principles of beauty that are universal. The most basic assumption some might make it that their own concept of beauty is the universal definition and anybody who disagrees is wrong. Next, there are those who are OK with "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" - really meaning it's the the brain of the beholder. How much is our brain like a bee brain. It doesn't have to be very similar. Our common ancestor was a little worm that barely had a nervous system. But still, even computer vision systems are beginning to exibit some aspects similar to natural vision systems. So maybe some things just evolve in vision systems, no matter what the species. (Sort of like how eyes are pretty similar in squid and humans even though they evolved separately.) Or, maybe it's no accedent. Humans used to eat a lot of fruit. Maybe nature made us like flowers because they are good indications of fruit. And by the way, I don't mean flowers that look like human private parts, I know exactly why people think those are beautiful, I just mean normal little flowers.

Real quote about nature

"he does grant some peace and security in this world we accept as real, whereas you will
always be like a hot, burning fire to my soul despite and maybe because of your unusually advanced, yet basic nature"

How to measure love

It's difficult for me to estimate my own love toward a woman, but I've found a way. The key question: how upset would I be if she became pregnant, had my child, and I supported this child. If I'm not upset at all, that is true love.

Over-use of quantum physics when pop speakers are talking about how the mind works

Seems to be an over-use of quantum physics when pop speakers are talking about how the mind works. Quantum physics is the basis of chemistry and electronics... and those are important for brain function, but you often don't need to get deep into the weirdness of QM to understand and characterize brain function. The cells are often computing in the more deterministic way that we are familiar with rather than the weird "quantum computer" way. Scientists build good models of single brain cells without using quantum mechanics (see NEURON simulator). As a thought experiment, you could replace each of the cells in your brain with a simulated neuron. You certainly wouldn't notice the different if you just replaced one with a machine that somehow received and created the same signals. (For an example, a pacemaker for a heart is sort of is a virtual cell signal simulator that works pretty well.) You could eventually replace every cell with a machine that does the same thing. I assume after all that you wouldn't know the difference. You'd be like the same program running on a different computer at that point. I suppose it's theoretically possible that something funny is going on specifically with organic biology that makes conciousness more real, but honestly I doubt it. So, why do the pop speakers talk about QM so much? - because it sounds cool. Nobody wants to be just an extremely complex computer or machine - we want to be something that we cannot understand. We want some magic. Quantum mechanics is strange enough at the level of single atom interactions to seem almost magical. But lets get real, cell are not atoms, and the brain is an analog computer, period.